FILE – In this July 7, 2016, file photo, then-National Security Adviser Susan Rice follows then-President Barack Obama across the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, to board Marine One. On Sunday, Oct. 7, 2018, Rice said she’ll decide after the midterm elections whether to run for the Senate from Maine in 2020. Rice is weighing whether to try to unseat Republican Sen. Susan Collins, whose decision to support Brett Kavanaugh was key to his confirmation to the Supreme Court. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)

Former national security adviser Susan Rice just joined the chorus of voices caterwauling about the supposed racism of those referring to China when discussing the coronavirus. The target of her ire was Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has used the term “Wuhan virus” when describing the pandemic.

In a Tuesday appearance on MSNBC, the former adviser was asked about government officials who have used the term. “It’s shameful. I mean, for the United States to be race-baiting,” she began. She continued, insisting that the moniker is “designed to stigmatize people of Asian descent,” and to be “divisive.”

Rice then argued that people should not link the virus to China despite the fact that it originated in China. “And it’s certainly not the way the leadership of the United States, the secretary of state, the president of the United States, ought to be behaving in the best of times – but certainly not in a crisis,” she stressed. “The reality is that viruses can arise in any corner of the globe then spread to any corner of the globe.”

This isn’t the first time Rice has used the virus to falsely smear conservatives as racists. In an appearance on CNN, she said, “We are not behaving well when we talk about, as the president does every day, the Chinese virus, the Wuhan flu, and all of these racist descriptions. The fact of the matter is that viruses don’t know borders, they don’t respect borders.”

President Trump has excoriated the Chinese government for failing to contain the virus at the outset. He began using the term “Chinese virus” after a Chinese official deceptively insisted that the United States military planted COVID-19 somewhere in Wuhan.

So far, over 823,000 cases of coronavirus that have materialized worldwide. At least 40,708 people have died because of the illness, according to the Johns Hopkins University tracker. Currently, the United States has reported more deaths than China’s official numbers. Of course, it’s worth noting that China’s government is almost certainly lying about their actual death rates.

As I’ve written previously, the whole furor over acknowledging the coronavirus’ country of origin is nothing more than an attempt to further politicize the issue. The Democrats and their close friends and allies in the corporate press aren’t concerned with educating the public about the disease; Instead, they are only interested in the pandemic’s usefulness as a political weapon.

Almost nobody on the left engaged in this type of shrill whining when government officials used terms like “Ebola virus” to describe the disease that originated in Africa. Perhaps they just hadn’t yet achieved the level of wokeness that they have at the present?

Let me know what you think in the comments below!

Follow me on Twitter: @JeffOnTheRight